Keeping Your Child on a Balanced Diet When They Start School

Parents hear the same advice from every source: balanced nutrition builds a healthy child. A tiny bit of digging on the internet reveals the balance necessary between protein, iron, calcium, fats, carbohydrates, sodium, and sugars. You can even find extensive lists of foods that contain the required nutrients, and without much effort find fun ways to present these foods.

None of these lists gets the nutrients inside your child.

By the time school begins, you've been around this tiny human for at least five years. You know what they will and will not eat, no matter how many times the food is presented [Experts recommend presenting a food at least ten times before you can expect a child to accept it as edible (McGinnis, Gootman, Kraak, 2006) )]. You know that presented with healthy food, children will eat the "yummies" and leave the nutrients in the lunchbox or on the tray.

And now they are at school, no longer under your watchful eye or privy to your haranguing to "eat your vegetables!"

Relax, Mom.

Go back to your first experiences trying to get your child to eat. In early infancy, she took so long to learn how to nurse, or you had to try several formulas to find one he'd digest. Still, baby gained weight and grew. Your pediatrician or nurse probably murmured time-old wisdom that baby would eat when he or she got hungry. Still, you worried.

This advice had to be repeated to you at every eating stage in your child's life. Basic cereal. Pureed food. Finger food. "He'll eat when he gets hungry," you heard, but your baby (now a preschooler) insisted on drawing nutrients from air alone-and somehow your child grew.

School is a new environment. If you have done your part, presenting healthy foods whether eaten or not, your food values have been absorbed. True malnutrition is easily avoided if the food you provide-whether packed at home or purchased at school-is full of what the child needs to grow. When your child feels hungry, place nutritious food within reach and insist they eat "real food" before sugary, fattening or salty snacks. He or she will most likely find enough nutrients to thrive. As an added bonus, they may be too full of "real food" to desire sugary, fattening or salty snacks.

Fiber, vitamins and minerals from fruits and vegetables; starches and carbohydrates from grains; iron and calcium from dairy products, legumes and meat; plain water-put these on the table, consume them yourself in front of your children, and you'll have nothing to worry over.